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Absolutely
Especially when you are a young bloke barely on the minimum like Blaize was.
Gronkles being ironic again.
I assume other clubs will keep using them (but not mentioning them in retention announcements) so they are still relevant as a topic of discussion. Every time we fail to retain a player we can speculate whether a PO might have kept him. More money might also have kept him, but clubs need to be mindful of the cap. They can't just keep upping the cash component to keep everyone. It's very exciting.
Payne Haas has won nothing. But also, current players are probably the only ones you'd give a PO to, because you know if they fit into the group. Haas is a great player but he might arrive and make a merkin of himself. In that case he might not be worth what we're paying and we'd want him gone as soon as his contract ended.
"Hey Blaize/Ethan, Dylan Brown is one of our best players and every merkin at the club loves him, but could you just sign this extension in case he leaves when his contract ends in two years? And because we need to put so much money aside for him and Moses, there's not a lot left over for backup halves, so you'll have to re-sign very cheap. If Drown does leave, we'll look at giving you an upgrade."
But then would also be far less valuable to the player, meaning it would have been less useful as a bargaining chip back in 2022.
* iconic
Even more to the point, what if they wanted more money if we couldn't offer the POs and that money just wasn't available under our presumably arse tight salary cap at the time. Given we are shedding players rather than trying to keep a grand final team together, we are obviously under far less cap pressure now than we were back then. It makes sense that we can just offer more cash in 2025 and beyond rather than resorting to player options.
Which is why it's something valuable we can offer the player instead of more cash ffs. It's a thing that had value to the player that we were able to give him in exchange for something valuable to the club. Whatever that value is (essentially a discount), the media and fans will never know what it was, but the club and player/manager do. That value was taken by the club at the time of signing the contract. It's not in the news. Then the player has a valuable thing that they can exercise later, which did eventually end up in the news, years later. Can we take it as given that the PO benefits the player and it's not some sneaky gotcha that the club didn't anticipate. If it didn't benefit the player, the club would gain nothing from offering it during negotiations.
It depends how much money other clubs were offering back then. To illustrate this, look at Drown's most recent decision with the Knights. He had his existing Eels PO on the table, that if activated, included a future PO. Instead he took a bigger money offer from the Knights because it was worth more to him than the existing contract with us, that included a further PO in the future.
It was minimal risk for us. How much would the PO have been for? Probably no more than minimum salary.
Look at it as insurance. I pay about 10% of the value of my car every three years. It's not a 'sugar hit', it is a cost I don't like, but which protects me in a worst case scenario. I haven't been in a car crash for 12 years, and I haven't been at fault since sometime in the mid-90s. I still keep paying for full comprehensive insurance. I think my situation is fairly standard.
